Open Stack

On Tue, 2014-08-05 at 18:03 +0200, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> With the incredible growth of OpenStack, our development community is
> facing complex challenges. How we handle those might determine the
> ultimate success or failure of OpenStack.
> 
> With this cycle we hit new limits in our processes, tools and cultural
> setup. This resulted in new limiting factors on our overall velocity,
> which is frustrating for developers. This resulted in the burnout of key
> firefighting resources. This resulted in tension between people who try
> to get specific work done and people who try to keep a handle on the big
> picture.

Always fun catching up on threads like this after being away ... :)

I think the thread has revolved around three distinct areas:

  1) The per-project review backlog, its implications for per-project 
     velocity, and ideas for new workflows or tooling

  2) Cross-project scaling issues that get worse as we add more 
     integrated projects

  3) The factors that go into deciding whether a project belongs in the 
     integrated release - including the appropriateness of its scope,
     the soundness of its architecture and how "production ready" it is.

The first is important - hugely important - but I don't think it has any
bearing on the makeup, scope or contents of the integrated release, but
certainly will have a huge bearing on the success of the release and the
project more generally.

The third strikes me as a part of the natural evolution around how we
think about the integrated release. I don't think there's any particular
crisis or massive urgency here. As the TC considers proposals to
integrate (or de-integrate) projects, we'll continue to work through
this. These debates are contentious enough that we should avoid adding
unnecessary drama to them by conflating the issues with more pressing,
urgent issues.

I think the second area is where we should focus. We're concerned that
we're hitting a breaking point with some cross-project issues - like
release management, the gate, a high level of non-deterministic test
failures, insufficient cross-project collaboration on technical debt
(e.g. via Oslo), difficulty in reaching consensus on new cross-project
initiatives (Sean gave the examples of Group Based Policy and Rally) -
such that drastic measures are required. Like maybe we should not accept
any new integrated projects in this cycle while we work through those
issues.

Digging deeper into that means itemizing these cross-project scaling
issues, figuring out which of them need drastic intervention, discussing
what the intervention might be and the realistic overall effects of
those interventions.

AFAICT, the closest we've come in the thread to that level of detail is
Sean's email here:

  http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2014-August/042277.html

Mark.